No, seriously - that's what it is
Dyson’s most ambitious product to date has gone live – the Dyson Zone is a pair of headphones with an air purifying visor that sits in front of your mouth.
We know what you’re thinking — we double checked the date on this one and it is definitely not an April fool’s gag.
The Dyson Zone is also not what it at first appears in another sense.
It is not a quick, if late, cash in on the pandemic. Dyson says the Zone has emerged after six years of development and “more than 500 prototypes”.
The Dyson Zone is not just a regular pair of headphones with a gamer style N95 filtering mask attached to its front either. It is, if anything, a lot weirder than that.
This is a no-contact air purifying wearable. The purifier part sits in front of your face, not on it.
Buyer’s guide: The best smart air purifiers
How Dyson’s particular expertise relates to such a wearable makes more sense when you take a look at the tech inside. There are compressor motors in each ear cup, pulling outside air through filters and passing it down towards the wearer’s nose and mouth.
This air is carefully directed to avoid you mostly breathing in the “polluted” outside air rather than the filtered stuff from the Dyson Zone.
This is the main role of the Dyson Zone: increasing the quality of air we breathe, particularly for those who live in built-up areas where the actual air quality may be very poor.
Dyson claims the filtration system will remove allergens, brake dust, and gases like nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide and ozone.
Dyson says this design has evolved from an early iteration that makes this final Star Trek-adjacent version seem svelte.
Originally the compressor motor was housed in a backpack, and it delivered filtered air through a snorkel-style mouthpiece.
Dyson Zone details
You probably have some questions.
Yes, you can remove the visor and use the Dyson Zone as a normal pair of headphones. No, we don’t yet know how much it will cost or the exact date you’ll be able to buy one, but Dyson says the Zone will be available from “Autumn 2022”.
There are some other details worth knowing too. The Dyson Zone includes attachments that create a seal around your face, offering FFP2-grade protection or that comparable with a standard face covering.
The Dyson Zone also has three intensity modes: low, medium and high. There’s an Auto mode that switches between them based on data harvested from an accelerometer motion sensor. If you start running, the airflow will increase.
The specifics of the actual headphones aren’t going to command much attention when they come with a sci-fi face “visor” attached, but Dyson has given us some detail on the sound too. There’s active noise cancellation, which is a must-have in a set made primarily for city use.
Dyson says it aimed for a “neutral” frequency response and took a “scientific approach” to the tuning of the drivers.
The headband also tries to distribute the weight over the whole top of your head, not a single point. We don’t know how much the Dyson Zone weighs yet, but you can be sure it will be significantly more than an ordinary pair of headphones when the visor is attached.
More details will be announced in the months between now and the Dyson Zone’s release, which will be September at the very earliest.
Ed’s note – Paul Lamkin:
I’m a bit of a Dyson fanboy. If you come to my house you’ll find Dyson robot vacuum cleaners cleaning the floors and an array of Dyson machines heating, cooling, humidifying and purifying the air all over the gaff.
At my house Dyson is very much in you face. But now you can have Dyson literally in your face.
But even for the biggest Dyson fans the Zone is a big ask to get on board with. There’s just nothing on the market right now that does, or more importantly looks, anything like it.
I’ve actually worn the Dyson Zone. In a demo room, with Dyson engineers.
Would I walk down the street wearing one? Probably not… I’m all for being a tech early adopter most of the time – it’s part of the job.
But most of the time that doesn’t mean people staring at you with their mouths wide open.
Dyson could well be onto something with the Zone. Or it could end up being a massive PR disaster.
I’ll be honest, I’m wary it might be the latter.
